Dianna stared at her phone, mouth open, totally perplexed by the text that just popped up.
Last night was beautiful.
You are the gentlest, sweetest and most beautiful woman.
Thank you for everything.
They came in from someone named Gayle.
But … she did not know anyone by that name. Not that spelling, and the only other Gail she knew was an old friend who now lived in San Jose.
She almost deleted the text and blocked the number, thinking that it was some kind of scam. She got as far as loading the screen that allowed her to block.
Did not, though.
Instead she scrolled up from the text from this unknown person. And nearly screamed. There were other texts. From Gayle.
And texts from her.
A lot of them. And they were from last night.
She read and read and read. Over and over, piecing together an encounter that started at Tank Girl and ended in her own damn bed. There were photos of Gayle, taken at—apparently—Dianna’s request. A lovely nude of a beautiful white woman with dark hair and a nervous smile. And a reciprocal photo of Dianna, also naked, touching her fingertips to her sternum over her heart, lips puckered as if blowing a kiss.
The sheets on which Dianna lay were the ones on the bed right now. New sheets, bought less than a month ago. She’d put them on fresh yesterday morning.
She whirled and ran upstairs and stared at those sheets, and the blanket. She bent and sniffed, capturing the fading scents of perfume and sex. Dianna backed away from the bed, stumbling, gasping as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Her back thumped against the dresser. Her knees, already weak from shock, buckled and she sat down hard on the floor. The bed seemed to crouch there, sneaky and full of secrets that made no sense.
Dianna had no idea how long she sat there. A minute or an hour. Her mind was reeling and she kept her palms flat on the floorboards to keep from falling off the edge of the world.
“Gayle,” she said. And a moment later whispered the name as a question. “Gayle…?”
There was something there. Buried so deep it was barely a shadow. A face filled with hope and self-consciousness and need and desire and fear. Soft lips speaking her name in the night, then brushing against her cheek. Inexpert hands, used to different kinds of curves, discovering the art of touching another woman.
“Who are you?” Dianna asked aloud as panic flared in her. She could feel her heart hammering and the room was suddenly too bright.
Why can’t I remember?
There was a momentary flash of horror as she wondered if she’d been drugged somehow. Date rape was not exclusively a hetero thing. Dianna knew women who had been raped by other women. Was that what this was?
She searched her heart and also her insights, the part of her that was able to peel back the ordinary layers of perception. She focused everything that made her who she was on the question.
“No,” she said aloud. And believed it.
Not rape. Not a roofie or some other drug.
Then … what?
The bed, with its rumpled sheets, and the text messages on her phone remained immutable, challenging the emptiness of her memories with their truth.
And it was then, in that moment, as she was reaching for the phone, which had fallen from her hand when she hit the dresser, that she saw her forearm. Saw the tattoo.
Saw what was left of the tattoo.
Suddenly her mind was gone. Shifting hard away from the absolute moment and into something approaching a fugue state. The room vanished. The three-dimensional reality faded. She stood, naked and terrified, in the bedroom of someone she did not know. A room she’d never been to.
A man lay naked on the bed. Pale, ugly, lumpy, hairless. Tattoos of flies covered his flesh. The air in the room was fetid and smelled of yeast, sweat, anger, and the wrong kind of sex. The ejaculate engineered through hate rather than a cleaner form of passion. There were stains all over the sheets, and more flies—real ones—swarming above the man. Dianna took a tentative step forward, repelled and compelled in equal measures. But there was something on the man’s skin. Images.
Tattoos. Not only those of flies. Faces. Symbols.
And …
A green vine, delicate with the sweetness of early spring, sprouting from a blue vein near the wrist. Curling up the forearm, sprouting roses in dozens of shades, each flower larger and more vibrant than the last, and also subtly different—more realistic, more defined—until a final rose whose lush petals brushed against the tender inside of her elbow. Not a flower in transition, but one that was so clearly itself that seeing it was a celebration of joy.
The tattoo seemed to writhe on his skin as if struggling to break free of him. It was very rich in color, but only in places. Some of it was pale, and there were pieces missing except for the faintest of outlines.
She looked at her own forearm, at the same design, faded to a ghostly outline. Nearly gone.
The man lay there on the bed, sweating, flesh wobbling, eyes glazed in ecstasy, chest rising and falling rapidly. Then he froze and gasped. His eyes instantly sharpened and he jerked his head toward her. Eyes locked on her. Seeing her. Actually seeing her.
She watched his expression change from startled fear to something else. The eyes crinkled, the nose wrinkled, and the mouth widened into a wide, wet, leering grin of absolute delight.
“They’re delicious,” he said, spit flecking his chin, his hand beginning to move again. “They’re so goddamn delicious and you can’t have them back. You can never have them back.”
Dianna screamed her way back to her own bedroom.